T-Minus 9 Days

This had been the most eventful week we’ve had all year. We have accomplished so much in just a few days. The whole team has been working very hard so we will be prepared for our time in Houston. We have spent many days this week practicing driving and picking up rocks.

Friday: 5/5/17

Today, we had our last design review meeting. Our reviews gave us some very helpful things for us to consider for the last few days before we leave for Houston. One of the main things was for us to be very cautious with C.LO.E.E. traveling. They have seen a lot of good teams end up breaking the robot on their way to the competition. We need to find a safe way to get our rover to sit still on a bus for 13 hours. We also fixed our dynamixel servos. When you put the hand on the ground or put too much pressure on the dynamixel servos, they blink red and go out and need to be reset. In the past, we had to fix it by flipping the switch on the rover. Hayden came up with a program that resets the dynamixels without resetting the power.

Thursday: 5/4/17

More testing!! Warm weather!! YAY!

We set up the live stream on youtube yesterday.

It is a struggle getting people to go home when they are so excited about C.L.O.E.E.

Alyssa ran over Jenny’s phone with the rover… The phone is okay though.

May 4th was the day our parts began to show a little wear and tear, because our testing sessions have been back to back. The spring got caught on the dynamixel cable and popped off of its mount, the bracket is bent, and the Gimbal camera broke for the second time. We also had some bad latency. Overall, our testing went slightly overtime. In good news, we tested our ability to set up a YouTube livestream and we were successful in these efforts. We tested for an hour. In this time, we were able to pick up 9 rocks.

Wednedsay: 5/3/17

Lane picked up a molding orange because he confused it with a rock. You know that when Hayden is shivering, its really cold. The jetpack didn’t like cold weather either. However, our reviewers said it probably wasn’t the jetpack but the battery that didn’t like the cold.

5/2/17

Tuesday:

May 15th was officially claimed as Trinidad state Robotics day in our city. We were invited to attend the city counsel meeting where we showed off C.L.O.E.E. and received our Proclamation.